Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

“It’s an interesting question,” said the doctor.

“I know and I hate asking it. We’re all of us in the same boat, after all. But sometimes these questions have to be asked. How else are we to judge a man, if we don’t listen to what other people say about him?” I shrugged. “It might be something that’s happened here. Or something that happened back in Europe. During the war, perhaps.”

“No, no, you’re quite right to ask, Herr Hausner. And I appreciate your confidence. Well then, let me see.” He sipped some tea and thought for a moment. “Yes. There’s a fellow called Eisenstedt, Wilhelm von Eisenstedt, who was an SS captain at Buchenwald. He lives in a house on Calle Monasterio and calls himself Fernando Eifler. He’s let himself go a bit. Drinks too much. But at Buchenwald he was notoriously and sadistically homosexual.”

I tried to suppress a smile. Eifler had been the man in the dressing gown with whom I’d shared the safe house on Monasterio when I first arrived in Argentina. So that was who and what he was.

“Also, yes, also a man called Pedro Olmos. His real name is Walter Kutschmann, and he’s another ex-SS captain. Kutschmann was a murderer by anyone’s definition of the word. Someone who enjoyed killing for killing’s sake.”

Vaernet described Kutchsmann’s wartime activities in detail.

“I believe he now works for Osram. The lightbulb company. I can’t answer for what kind of man he is today. But his wife Geralda’s conduct is less than proper, in my opinion. She gasses stray dogs for a living. Can you imagine such a thing? What kind of a person could do that? What kind of a woman is it who gasses poor dumb animals for a living?”

I could easily have answered him. Only he wouldn’t have understood. But I went to see Pedro Olmos anyway.

He and his wife lived on the outskirts of the city, near the electrical factory where Pedro Olmos worked. He was younger than I’d imagined, no more than thirty-five, which meant he was in his mid-twenties when he’d been a Gestapo captain in Paris; and little more than a boy when he’d been a lieutenant murdering Jews in Poland as part of a special action group. He had been just eighteen when Anita Schwarz was murdered in 1932, and I thought he was probably too young to be the man I was looking for. But you never can tell.

Pedro Olmos was from Dresden. He had met and married Geralda in Buenos Aires. They had several dogs and cats but no children. They were a good-looking couple. Geralda didn’t speak German, which was probably why Pedro felt able to confess that he’d been a lot more than just friendly with Coco Chanel while he was stationed in Paris. He was certainly smooth enough. He spoke excellent Spanish, French, and some Polish, which, he said, was why he was working in Osram’s travel department. Both he and Geralda were much exercised about the city’s stray-dog population, which was considerable, and they had a grant from the city authorities to round them up and gas them. It seemed an unusual occupation for a woman who described herself as an animal lover. She even took me to their basement and showed me the humane-killing facility she used. This was a simple metal hut with a rubber-sealed door that was attached to a petrol generator. Geralda carefully explained that when the dogs were dead, she burned the bodies in their household incinerator. She seemed very proud of her “humane service” and described it in a way that made me think she’d never heard of such a thing as a gas van. Given Olmos’s SS background, it wasn’t too difficult to imagine that perhaps she had got the idea from her husband.

I asked him the same question I had asked Vaernet: Was there anyone among our old comrades in Argentina whom he considered to be beyond the pale?

“Oh, yes.” Olmos spoke with alacrity, and I was beginning to realize that there was not much loyalty among the old comrades. “I can give you the name of just such a man. Probably the most dangerous man I’ve ever met, anywhere. His name is Otto Skorzeny.”

I tried not to look surprised. Naturally, I knew of Otto Skorzeny. Few Germans had not heard of the daring author of Mussolini’s mountaintop rescue in 1943. I even remembered seeing photographs of his heavily scarred face in all the magazines when Hitler had awarded him the Knight’s Cross. He certainly looked like a dangerous man. The trouble was, Skorzeny did not appear on the list of names that the colonel had given me. And until his name came up, I’d had no idea that he was still alive, let alone that he now lived in Argentina. A ruthless killer, yes. But a psychopath? I decided to ask Montalban about him when next I saw him.

Meanwhile, Pedro Olmos had thought of someone else he considered a person undeserving of a good-conduct pass. The ratline, as the Americans called organizations like the ODESSA and the Old Comrades, which existed to help Nazis escape from Europe, was beginning to look well named. The man Olmos thought of was called Kurt Christmann.

Christmann was interesting to me, because he was from Munich and born in 1907, which made him twenty-five at the time of Anita Schwarz’s murder. He was forty-three years old, once a lawyer who now worked for the Fuldner Bank on Avenida Cordoba. Christmann lived in a comfortable apartment on Esmeralda and, within five minutes of meeting him, I had marked him down as a definite suspect. He had commanded a killing detail in Russia. For a while, I’d been in the Ukraine myself, of course. It gave us something to talk about. Something I could use to help gain his confidence and get him talking.

Fair-haired, with rimless glasses and a musician’s slender hands, Christmann wasn’t exactly the kind of blond beast you’d have seen striding across the screen in a Leni Riefenstahl movie. He was more the sort you’d have seen walking quietly through a law library with a couple of books under his arm. Until he’d joined the SS in 1942, he’d worked for the Gestapo in Vienna, Innsbruck, and Salzburg, and I marked him down as the kind of promotion-hungry, medal-seeking Nazi I’d often met before. Not so much blood and iron as bleach and Bakelite.

“So you were out in Ukraine, too,” he said, going all comradely on me. “Which part?”

“White Ruthenia. Minsk. Lvov. Lutsk. All over.”

“We were in the southern part of Russia, mainly,” he said. “Krasnodar and Stavropol. And in the northern Caucasus. The action group was headed by Otto Ohlendorf, and Beerkamp. My unit was commanded by an officer named Seetzen. Nice fellow. We had three gas vans at our disposal. Two big Saurers and a little Diamond. Mostly it was clearing out hospitals and asylums. The children’s homes were the worst. But don’t think these were normal healthy kids, mind. They weren’t. They were gimps, you know? Feebleminded, retarded kids. Bedridden, disabled. Better off out of it, if you asked me. Especially given the way the Popovs looked after them, which was to say hardly at all. The conditions in some of these places were appalling. In a way, gassing them like we did was a bloody kindness. Putting them out of their misery, we were. You’d have done the same for an injured horse. Anyway, that’s the way we looked at it.”

He paused, as if recalling some of the terrible scenes that he had witnessed. I almost pitied him. I wouldn’t have had his thoughts for anything.

“Mind you, it was still hard work. Not everyone could stick it. Some of the kids would catch on as to what was happening and we’d have to throw them in the vans. That could be pretty rough. We had to shoot a few who tried to escape. But once they were inside the van and the doors were shut, it was pretty quick, I think. They’d hammer on the sides of the truck for a few minutes and that would be it. Over. The more of them we managed to squeeze into the truck, the quicker it would be. I was in charge of that detail between August 1942 and July 1943, by which time we were in general retreat, of course.